It takes artistic invention and considerable courage to design a concert programme solely around tragic topics; yet the connecting link between the various items on the last subscription concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra was – directly or indirectly – death and great composers’ reaction to it.

Vladimir Jurowski put in a surprise appearance at the harpsichord at the start of this London Philharmonic Orchestra concert, which saw Leonidas Kavakos join the orchestra for concertos by Bach and Karl Amadeus Hartmann. But it was the Eroica that drew the strongest performance.

Even in a festival anchored around a handful of 20th-century composers touched by the presence of war – Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, Béla Bartók, Witold Lutosławski – the program on Thursday night with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and their chief conductor, Marek Janowski, was especially haunted by the memory of atrocity.